The In-Between
by indigofirelight
Summary: After losing the Ponds, the Doctor finds himself kicking around space aimlessly, having sworn off taking on any more companions. Things don't always work out as he intends, though - and why should they ever? [11/OC, post-Ponds, pre-Clara]
1. Act I - The Companion Type

**The In-Between**

An Eleven Story

**oOo**

**The Doctor** \- the last Time Lord, a man who adventures to outrun his guilt and staves off the loneliness by bringing companions. Although, having had the last pair torn away from him, he's less keen on letting himself have company these days.

**oOo**

"Dear, not now."

The voice could have belonged to a twenty-something man, an intellectual type, probably British. It could have belonged to a scatterbrained professor growing tired of all his secretary's insistence that he take a break from all the papers. Perhaps the professor had not slept very well, or had skipped one too many meals, and his emotional balance was beginning to fall through. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps - there was a wealth of things to be deduced about the twenty-something man.

And it was all true - except for the fact that the young man was ancient, and he was no professor. He was the Doctor, and he hailed from about as far from Britain as one could possibly get. He had no secretary, though from time to time he'd felt that he could do with one. Even less true was the reason for the lackluster shuffle to his gait, for his distressed, brittle tone. No amount of papers could do that much damage to a man, the sort that made everything hurt.

No.

The Doctor had been shattered. And like always, it was all his fault. All his fault, his, that the Ponds had been ripped away from him, locked so far from his grasp that he could never hope to see them again. It was Donna all over again. It was Martha, it was Rose…

(And didn't that just drive a knife through his hearts again? Wasn't it so, so similar to his Ponds?)

"I mean it. I'm tired."

The Doctor was not a good man, and far from a deserving one. But just once, would it be too much for him to not suffer the loss of another companion? Just once…

And there it was, the sting that came of thinking of another so soon. He could have kicked himself. Stupid, stupid, who was he to snatch another away from their lives, to dance around the cosmos with them, to put the stars in their eyes knowing fully what happened to the Doctor's companions?

He rested his head against the console, so much darker and quieter than he was used to. No life. No laughter.

Dead men, that was what became of them. And forgotten ones, and hurting ones. The Doctor was a plague and it was only right that he burn out, too. So he'd burn out. Here. This blue box was his quarantine and he was done running.

**oOo**

Or, he would have been, if the TARDIS would stop poking at his mental shields every _five minutes._

The Doctor turned over almost petulantly in his seldom used bed, batting at the air as if he could banish the mental link. Brown hair flopped into eyes flickering with exhaustion and he let out a groan.

"Can't a man get even five minutes' rest?"

Smug correction pulsing in his head.

"Man. Time Lord. Can't a Time Lord get five minutes, then? Why so pedantic all of a sudden, eh?" Rough irritation began to show through the overall sulky tone. Testy? Maybe. But he had reason to be, and the old girl wasn't leaving well enough alone.

Maybe if he jammed the pillow over his head? Never let it be said the Doctor wasn't clever.

He jammed the pillow over his head, and the TARDIS' vaguely exasperated bemusement still came through clear as a bell. Ugh. Telepathy. Always an enemy to those who sought refuge behind Quilladrian silk and feathers.

The Doctor chucked the pillow against the far wall. His already tense emotions boiled over for a split second, scratching the surface of the benign and airheady face he rather liked to wear.

"I've said, not now!" he shouted at the ceiling. "It's - look, all of time and space and we can't spare a moment for some peace and quiet? 'Cause I don't ask for peace and quiet much, you know, and never for very long!"

Doubt, tolling a spiraling and curious blue arc within the walls of the Doctor's mind. There were many people he could fool, and the old girl wasn't one of them. Didn't mean he had to appreciate it.

Realizing he'd scrambled out of the covers and abandoned his weak attempt to sleep off the still-raw loss (red, red hair and a nose like a rapier, familiar faces torn from his lonely arms like everything, everything else and had he not held on tightly enough fondly enough fiercely enough had he not-?), the Doctor crossed his arms, sitting perched on the edge of the mattress.

"So it's been half a century," he admitted evasively, eyes flicking between each socked foot as if they held all the answers. "That's - that's barely a sit-down. 'S not like I'm planning on moping my way through the next millenia…"

Again, the TARDIS broadcast a ringing sense of healthy skepticism.

"Oi!" the Doctor protested. "I don't mope. There's no moping going on here! The Doctor doesn't mope!"

Then what's with that sad hobo look you're sportin', then, Raggedy Man? asked a voice that was not the TARDIS's. The Doctor winced, almost leaning back onto the bed with how real the ache was. Of course he'd managed to capture Amy's voice perfectly. Just another on the list of rational voices of the Doctor's long-lost.

No.

Best not to dwell. Best to forget. Best to… to sit for a moment and breathe and not think of Manhattan and not mope, because he wasn't.

"I'm not moping," he reaffirmed, brandishing a finger at the ceiling just to show how much he meant it. "Alright people never mope, and I am the alrightest."

In a show of how alright he was, the Doctor would have stepped foot onto one single isolated planet, took in its scenec beauty, and proceeded to shut himself up in the TARDIS for another fifty years of sackcloth and sitting vigil.

Instead, the TARDIS had other, more efficient plans. They involved, ultimately, klaxons, a rough landing, locked doors, and a new stray - though not all at once.

Baby steps, see.

Baby steps.


	2. 1: andi

Esperanza Andrea was going to kill someone. Or, at the very least, yell something very rude.

"_Ay, por el amor de_… Okay, but you've tried to talk to him, right? There's no way you could explain to him that I'm not in the country right now?"

A beat of silence, broken by the steady thump of sneakers on the ground as she pointedly continued weaving her way through the perpetually rain-spattered throngs. She didn't normally take note of the way people could differ from each other so much, especially not when she was the different one in the scenario, but she could see the occasional glances from people that told her she'd been marked as a tourist.

(What gave it away, though? The Spanish peppered into her phone conversation? The way she formed her English vowels, not tall and rounded and proper, but sharper, suited to rolled r's and _acentos_? Maybe it was the I Love New York shirt that she maybe should have traded for something more tasteful, but that was softer than anything else she'd worn?)

(At least she remembered to smile at people like a polite person.)

"Alright," she said into the receiver, nodding like she wasn't thoroughly inconvenienced at the moment. "Okay, I get what you're saying, Raul, and I know he's asking for me. Thing is -"

A black cab rolled by, kicking up a splash of rainwater that soaked her jeans from the knees down. Wonderful. So much for a perfect day of sightseeing.

"Thing is, I don't know how I'm going to visit Dad anytime soon when I'm on another continent."

The garbled squawk of surprise from the receiver was loud enough for the man walking next to her to shoot her a dirty look from his own phone, as if she'd interrupted his important walk-and-read session. Curiously, she glanced at his screen - some news article, classic tragedy piece, _fifth child missing_ shock story that was actually really sobering, but that also served to make the man in question look that much more self-righteous.

"Trouble, love?" he asked snidely, looking down his nose at her even though they were the same height.

Oh, she'd never be able to stop if she started arguing with this man about trouble. Her mom used to call her _chispita_ \- 'little spark.' And sometimes she took pride in living up to the name, but here and now? Not the best approach.

So instead, Andi beamed at the man with her best and brightest idiot-foreigner smile.

_"Lo siento, señor, pero no hablo inglés. ¿Y no seas tan chismoso, entiéndame? ¡Que tengas un buen día!"_

He blinked. He blinked again. People never did know what to do when you pretended to lose all memory of the common language. Andi smiled a bit wider and turned a corner, barely holding back a laugh to see him still glancing over his shoulder at her as he went on his puzzled way.

To her younger brother, who she'd been neglecting on the phone, she sighed and murmured an apology.

"Sorry, I'm back. And don't start! I'm serious about the other continent thing. I'd been planning this trip for a long time."

A beat. Another sigh, this one wearier. Was she not allowed to break away and do her own thing for once?

"Listen, Raul. I'm not his only kid. I'm not even his only daughter."

And why should her father call on her so much, considering that she was a daughter? He'd held onto the _machismo_ and chauvinistic ways he'd been raised with tightly, and it was strange to imagine that he'd let them go long enough to miss her visits.

She tried not to be bitter. She really, really did.

"I've been putting off this trip for the last, what? Five years? I wasn't going to wait anymore. I shouldn't have had to wait, okay?" Spoiled as it made her sound. She'd done her share of waiting.

"Okay. Just tell him I'll go see him when I get home. Promise. I love you all, alright? _Besos_. See you soon."

As Andi slipped her phone in her back pocket, it occurred to her that she'd ended up in a very quiet, empty part of London. Grey, and still, with lots of alleys.

Alleys weren't a great place to not get mugged, in her opinion. That established, she turned to leave.

Of course, that was when she heard the man struggling.

"Alright, open up, old girl!" A rattle, and then another rattle, as if he were shaking the doors to something. "Fun game you've devised, but I can't say I'm in any mood to play."

Maybe he'd gotten locked outside his house? Andi didn't know how doors worked here, but she doubted it was some alien technology. Every instinct was telling her not to go into the alley, but given how desperate the man in question sounded, she figured she could take her chances.

Besides, he sounded a bit nerdy. She could probably take him.

When she rounded the corner, Andi found herself staring at a rather professor-ish young man, about her age, she'd suppose. He was tugging fitfully at the doors of a tall blue police phone box tilted over at an angle, yelling at it as if it were alive. Or, more realistically, as if there were someone else inside.

"Hey," Andi said, chancing another few steps closer to the apparent madman. "Hey, _señor_, you okay? Do you need help?"

At the sound of her voice, the man stood straight up and whirled around. Brown hair flopped over his face as he processed her, eyes wide as if he had forgotten that other people existed.

His arms, clad in a rather classy coat, were raised half in defense and half in question. Andi half-grinned. He looked like a human question mark.

And he was, she thought vaguely, examining his startled eyes and pale brows, a strange kind of cute - emphasis on the strange.

"Oh. Person," he said, less to her than at her. "Wonderful. Hello, person! I don't suppose you've ever seen a man fussing over his extremely noncooperative ship before?"

Andi blinked. She blinked again. Well, that was a sentence to make anyone feel entirely flummoxed. In the spirit of politeness, and also in the name of curiosity, she answered honestly.

"No, I don't think so. Why, is that what I'm looking at right now?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Though there's nothing apparently wrong with…" He trailed off for a second, and suddenly picked back up on a dime. "Ah, help! You offered help. Thank you, but no thank you - unless you've got a master's understanding on quantum fluctuations and warp theory."

Oh, now, well, that sounded like three different brands of nerdy.

"I don't, just in case you're serious." Andi thought for a second, casting her eyes over his anachronistic, old-fashioned apparel and the mildly stressed-out cast to his facial expression. "Ah. You're serious? You actually travel places in that?"

"No, I use another box," was his sarcasm-tinged reply. "And it depends. If by places, you mean entirely different worlds, galaxies, kingdoms, times… then yes, I suppose I do some sightseeing from time to time."

"Wait, wait. You're not just messing with me? Because that sounds kind of awesome."

And it did. The entire idea of travelling to another country was enticing enough, but the thought of seeing the stars? Fantastical though it was, and undoubtedly impossible, it was an exciting prospect to think about.

She might actually like this man, even if he seemed to be a complete basketcase, and she decided humoring him wasn't a bad thing to do. The experience of meeting someone so odd was unlike any others she'd had, after all. This man, with his loafers and bowtie and barely-there eyebrows, was something special and she would welcome the fantasy he offered.

"Awesome doesn't cover it," said the man in question, and patted the side of the box a couple times. "All of time and space, at your leisure? It's H.G. Wells' fever dream, only a million times better."

Andi smiled.

London was crazy.

**oOo**

"_¿De veras?_" The woman - brown-haired, brown-eyed, just a study in shades of brown, really - tilted her head, looking the Doctor up and down as if he'd just announced that he was taking her to Disneyland. Even in Spanish - not that Earth languages posed much of a barrier to him, not between his intelligence and the TARDIS' tech - he still picked up on a healthy sense of skepticism laced through her genuine surprise. "Wow. I don't suppose you're about giving rides to complete strangers…?"

And complete stranger she may have been, but there was no missing the flicker of interest in her eyes as she glanced at the tall blue box. Ooh.

The Doctor smiled a bit too quickly at her, though even he felt it cutting more into grimace territory. Well, no helping that, even if he'd lost himself a little bit in bragging and maybe put her on to the idea a bit too much. It happened. Humans were just easily swayed like that.

"Nope!" he blurted, fully aware that it was rather rude and steamrolling right over any response she may have had. As it was, her brows furrowed. "No, no no no no, I'm, uh, not in the passenger business anymore. Nuh uh."

A stern look this time, because this human looked to be the troubley kind and he was in no mood for an argument. The way he leveled a in her direction for emphasis completed the picture, and made her slit eyebrows jump a bit. Curious cosmetic choice, that, but harmless as trends went.

Not so harmless was the whole companion gig. Not anymore.

(_How many times will you have to learn that lesson?_ some mournful voice inside seemed to ask.

He shook it off before he could identify it. He'd learned. He'd learned, and this was him showing it.)

"Tours've been cancelled," the Doctor said firmly. "_Indefinitely_."

Silly Eyebrows Girl leaned back for a moment, evidently knocked off kilter a tad by his fervor. Good. That was good, except that she recovered fairly quickly for a human and narrowed her eyes, contemplating.

What there was for her to contemplate, the Doctor didn't know. He didn't know, at least, until she pressed a fist to her chin and hummed, unperturbed by the cancelled tours newsflash.

"Well, from the way you've been standing out here with me the last twenty minutes instead of flying off in your little box," she said, and he felt his expression falter, "it sure looks like it."

_(Oh.)_

_(Oh, clever girl! Always trouble, those.)_

(This voice was clearly the Tenth's, the Doctor noted somewhat peevishly, and what was more, he was right. _Always_ trouble.)

His own status as Person-Barred-From-TARDIS-Entry deduced, the Doctor suddenly leaned over sharply into her line of sight, blocking her view of the TARDIS. A bit petty? Maybe, but he was hundreds of years old. He was allowed to be petty every now and then.

Brow-Slits wasn't backing down. Actually, it was just the opposite - she ducked right under one of his arms and stepped right up to the TARDIS doors, ignoring his pointed 'Oi!'

With nails lacquered a sunshiny yellow, she rapped on the doors, running a finger down the wood grain as if testing its spaceworthiness. She circled the TARDIS once, twice, careful to duck under where the old girl was tilted against the alley wall. A glance at the skidmarks on the ground, and a quiet hum of 'crashland?', and the entire time she did a beautiful job of ignoring the Doctor's stern face.

Any other time he could probably appreciate it, but now? Not so much.

He didn't like being ignored, or sidestepped, for that matter, especially by people he'd just met. The Doctor scowled for a second, and adjusted his bowtie to give him an air of importance and control.

"Well, you're certainly not from the Politeness Brigade, are you?" he asked sharply, watching her turn back from her examination and look him in the face.

The absolutely waspish expression in his eyes must have been obvious, then, because the woman's silly eyebrows drew together for a split second, her mouth quirking downward a tad.

"And you're upset because you're locked out of your ship."

"I am not locked out -"

"You're also mad because I shoved you a little, I can tell. Well, listen, _hombre_, I didn't mean to push past you like that, but I just wanted a closer look, okay? I didn't really buy your spaceship story. I still wouldn't, because she looks more shed than spaceship. Nice, but still just a box. Only…"

Two small steps brought her in better examining range of the Doctor, and he almost squirmed. Right. Must be the alley's atmosphere finally setting in. He examined her right back, from the top of her head to the tacky New York shirt to the damp tips of her scuffed sneakers, and when he looked back at her face, he found a startling amount of understanding.

"Only you're really upset about being stuck, huh? Can't fake that. Or at least, I want to think I'm not that easily tricked. So I just…_perdóname_, man."

"Pardon, what?" Of all he'd been expecting, an apology for the sidestepping wasn't it. Actually, so much of this conversation hadn't been what he'd expected, what he'd signed up for, and he wasn't sure he was fond of that, things-not-signed-up-for.

And what was more, her smugness - at having so perfectly pegged him and his situation, what a hyper-intelligent human, top marks - was beginning to grate on him, if only and especially because that was just it: it _wasn't_ smugness at all. It was curiosity, and a slight hint of bemusement, carefully attuned to his next words, his next actions. She was taking everything in - his frustration, the concept of a box-sized spaceship, the strange everything about this encounter that, for all intents and purposes, should not have happened - and she was turning it all over in her little human mind and patiently waiting for an answer.

It was the dangerous type, her sort. The contemplators.

_(The companion type, consumed by the need to comprehend, even if it killed them.)_

(The Doctor batted that thought away.)

"Oh. You know, sorry. For being insensitive," said the girl whose name he still hadn't asked, jolting him back to the here-and-now. "I get that a lot. That I'm insensitive. I'm working on it."

"Yeah, I'm getting that," the Doctor replied, somewhat mollified by her honesty. Stars knew that he'd been working on it for several lives now, and he couldn't begrudge her that much - it'd be far too hypocritical. "Not like I haven't been insensitive myself, though, so let's just call it even, what do you say? One insensitive soul to another?"

She, for her part, seemed to take very well to the idea, and she presented her hand for a shake without further hesitation.

"Deal," she said, and grinned. A wry little thing, but it met her eyes.

He found a smile to give back to her as he gripped her hand and shook. Silly things, handshakes.

"Now, then, what's your name?" he asked finally, because he was feeling a bit less tetchy and he couldn't just keep calling her Silly Eyebrows Girl forever; it was too long.

"So you have a name, Bowtie?" asked Silly Eyebrows Girl at the same time.

They looked at each other for a minute.

She laughed.

"Andi," she said. "I go by Andi. And you, perdito? What am I calling the stranded spaceman?"

He smiled again. Always a fun part, this. Achingly familiar, too.

"Nice to meet you, Andi," he said. "I'm the Doctor.

"And for your information, there's a perfectly good reason as to why I haven't flown off yet." A pause, for effect; he turned slowly, lost in thought.

"I just have to figure it out what it is."


End file.
